tableIO aims to be a simple lib to help saving application data from table files, being able to:

• Write table with io in a given path or file, just needing to require it to load later (if it's a .lua).
• Serialize table to string, so it can be saved on .txt file and be read later.
• Deserialize a string created with tableIO.

Serialization is essentially useful if you want to save data with another save mechanism instead of Lua's I/O, like love.filesystem from LÖVE game engine. (in this case is still possible to directly save and require the .lua, if instead of require, you use love.filesystem.load).

tableIO writes or serializes all (key,value) pairs where value is of any of these types:

• number
• string
• boolean
• table

Values of type function or nil will naturally get skipped (not written). It's not able to save metadata and userdata and will not work with tables with cycles.

• Tables saved as .lua can be read using require.
• Tables saved with a serialized string in a .txt can be extracted with a read('*all') call with a file opened with the .txt path. For detailed implementation see main.lua.

tableIO contains 4 functions that can be called:

Saves table with io in a given path. Specially useful to save the table and require it when needed.

Parameters:

• t: a reference to the table to be written
• path: a string represeting where the file should be saved, needs the extension (.lua,.txt,etc)
• (OPTIONAL) name: a string with the name the table will have on the file, default is 'table'

Returns:

• boolean: whether or not the save operation was successfull
• string: when not successfull, the error message, otherwise, nil

Save a table to a opened file.

Parameters:

• file: the opened file
• t: the table
• (optional)name: the name the table will have on the file, default is 'table'

Returns:

• boolean: whether or not the save operation was successfull
• string: when not successfull, the error message, otherwise, nil

Gets the tableIO serialization string of a given table. Can be written to a file to be read later.

Parameters:

• t: the table to be serialized with tableIO
• (optional)name: the name the table will have on the file, default is 'table'

Returns:

• string: the tableIO serialization of the table

Converts a tableIO serialization string to a table.

Parameters:

• string: a tableIO serialization string to be converted to table.

Returns:

• table: the conversion of the string

Simply require the script and call the save function:

  local tableIO = require 'tableIO'
  tableIO.save({key1 = 20, key2 = 'hello_world'},'myPath.lua')

Require the file, using the path where it was saved

  local myTable = require 'myPath'

A more complete example, including serialization and deserialization is available in main.lua